Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)
Glenn R. Flierl - MIT
| Date |
Time |
Location |
| September 30th, 2009 |
12:10am-1:00am |
54-915 |
Adaptive Dynamics and Effect of Circulation and Mixing
As climate and therefore the ocean changes, the organisms will also evolve to survive. Most large-scale biogeochemistry models work with a small set of plants and animals all having fixed traits; thus they cannot see this kind of change. In contrast, adaptive or trait-based models explicitly incorporate the possibility that different populations may appear and become dominant. We shall discuss the formulation and properties of such models. In the ocean, the “fitness” of an organism depends also on the physical circulation and mixing, since these induce temporal changes in the environment following a fluid parcel as well as bringing in potential competitors. We examine some of these effects to understand the interplay between the physics and the adaptive dynamics.